


These Are The Warning Signs We Remember

by elvntari



Series: A Oneshot for Every Chapter of The Silmarillion [1]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Almaren, Angst, Betrayal, Gen, Lovers To Enemies, M/M, Partner Betrayal, Pre-seduction Mairon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 07:32:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17240084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elvntari/pseuds/elvntari
Summary: Snippets from the months leading up to the destruction of Almaren, the dwelling place of the Ainur in middle earth.





	These Are The Warning Signs We Remember

**Author's Note:**

> This is the start of my new series: a oneshot for every chapter of the Silmarillion. Why do I do this? Because I apparently have no sense of self-preservation.

_ \- Mairon - _

The day had, without a doubt, been shitty.

Perhaps, at a (not completely unreasonable) stretch, one of the shittiest that Mairon had experienced in a very,  _ very  _ long time. He was tired—exhausted, completely beaten down; his limbs ached in a way that, before he’d taken physical form, he wouldn’t even have been able to conceive of. He’d been working for three days straight (ill-advised, he knew) and he had nothing to show for it.

_ You can always make it easier.  _

That was true—he had to credit the voice of his sloth with  _ some  _ things, but there was no merit in choosing  _ easy.  _ The  _ easy  _ way out was not the one that drew him in. Sure, efficiency was preferred—sought after, even—but there was a difference between efficient and  _ easy.  _ He chose to work, to build systems, to construct formulae from nothing; trial and error, and trial again were where his ‘heart’ (if it could be said that any other than Yavanna’s Maiar invested in such a tool) lay. 

He could call it a day, say that the weapon (for when Melkor, inevitably, made his return) was finished and that it was all part of the design. But it  _ wasn’t.  _ And he would always know that it wasn’t. So, he stayed, and he stared down the half-finished sword in front of him, trying to shape it by sheer force of will. 

He felt heat behind him, and he resisted the urge to collapse forward onto the anvil that was currently supporting his weight. 

“Why not just give up?” He hadn’t been aware that his imperfections had learnt to manifest as the voice of his long-term colleague and half-friend.

He laughed. “Don’t be stupid.”

Arien shifted, flitting around before him to meet his eyes as best she could while lacking any of her own. “I’m not.”

“If I give up, then I’ll have wasted three days to no avail.”

“And if you don’t, you’ll waste even longer and eventually be forced to stop when you inevitably collapse from exhaustion— _ please _ , give up.”

“No.”

She shook her head (if he could call it that), sparks trailing away and cutting through the darkness around her, and sighed—a gesture that was emphasised by the changing intensity of her flames. 

“Don’t let Aulë catch you out of form in the forges,” he said as she drifted away, fading into nothing. She came and went as she pleased; no sense of commitment to one state of being. He wondered why she didn’t just leave and serve someone else. He wondered why Aulë didn’t force her to; she was as unreliable as it was possible to be.

But, as soon as he was reasonably certain that she wasn’t still lying in wait, he slid to the ground, leaning back. 

This was just a breather. Just a few moments. Not long, and then he could heat it up again and continue as normal. A few moments passed with the rise and fall of his chest, then a few more; he was haunted by the half-shaped sword almost certainly hardening above him, but his arms were too heavy to move, and the room swam in front of him. 

This was not ideal, he decided, eventually. 

The temptation to simply shrug off the weight of a corporeal form hung before him. He could let it go and become pure heat and light and energy, and he could dance away somewhere else, but he was under obligation. 

_ While working, you are required to stay clothed in physical form to ensure that your focus is entirely on controlling the furnace rather than yourself. Due to previous  _ incidents,  _ I have decided that this is a reasonable course of action.  _

Maybe, it was a stupid rule. Maybe, it didn’t make any sense for a Maia as senior as himself. Maybe, he despised it, and wished for nothing more than it to be changed. 

Still, he was not a rule-breaker. 

He took another ten moments, counting them out carefully, and attempted to stand again. He fell forward onto his forearms. 

A shadow crossed in front of him. 

_ Shit.  _

“Lord Aulë, I—”

He looked up.  _ Not Aulë. _

“Mairon, you’ve received summons from the king.”

“Fuck off,” he wheezed, “did Arien put you up to do this?”

“ _ This is my job,”  _ said Eönwë, before he slid his arms under Mairon’s shoulders—the cool metal of his armour soothing some of the ache—and made an attempt to lift him from the ground. He allowed himself a moment to lean back against the herald’s chest.

He could shut his eyes.

He could sleep. It wouldn’t make it easy for Eönwë to drag him away, but he didn’t want that anyway. And he was leaving his work regardless. So, yes, why not sleep? Why not?

Why not…

\---

He awoke to  _ cold.  _

It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the room around him; a hall of chalk-white and gloss-blue and intricately arranged tiles that formed the image of moving sky on the ceiling whenever his gaze shifted. 

He was lying naked against a cold stone slab, freezing against his own body heat. He sat up and folded his legs, mentally making a list of things he needed to change to make his form right again; hair, eyes, his arms definitely felt far too long and far too spindly—

“Feeling any better?” Eönwë leant against one of the white-pillared entry-ways, arms folded. He was dressed in a clean white robe—off-duty, clearly. 

“Marginally so—if I’m not needed, I must get back to work—”

“Must you?”

He was taken aback by the question. Of all people to criticise him for wanting to do his job, he had expected the _ King’s Herald  _ to be the last.  

“I—”

“You aren’t required back at work for another—well—for a good while. You should get some rest.” He crossed the hall, barefoot against the stone floor. 

“Why would I want to rest?”

He stared him. “Mairon, I had to  _ carry  _ you here.”

“Well,” he said, as he pushed himself up from the slab, clothing himself with a wave of his hand, “you shan’t have to carry me back.”

He took a step forward and collapsed.

\---

He was warmth and heat and light, and he was free, a drifting spirit.

He didn’t need to see; he felt the world around him, he felt the presences around him, the presences like him, twisting and turning around his own.

Then a presence within him. 

And sight. 

He could see mountains upon mountains, lakes, rivers, the saplings of trees—lamps that he had helped to construct with his own bare hands. 

He saw cold and dark, and absence. There was something missing from the picture. Something that called to him in tones as deep as a roaring flame and, for the first time, he saw fire how all others must: as dangerous, and as enticing. 

He tugged away, lowering himself to the realm of flame, pulling at his restraints. 

He wanted to see this darkness; he wanted to know it. He wanted to let it consume him.

He wanted to give himself up to it and let it have its way. 

\---

He lay on the floor in Eönwë’s quarters, watching the ceiling. Eönwë slept on the ground next to him—or rather, his hröa lay on the ground next to him,  _ he  _ was absent. He looked peaceful—almost meditative. Mairon stood. 

He didn’t like how big the windows were here; the wind seemed to blow through them, around the room, pushing him towards their edge. He could fly just fine; it was the choice that he wanted.

_ Choice.  _

_ Choice and efficiency _ . He smirked. If there were two words to describe his deepest driving desires, they would be those. 

He remembered the darkness, scouring his mind for its location. It couldn’t hurt just to look. He turned to look at his companion—still resting—he could leave undetected. A moment of hesitation stilled him, like the way his hand held firm in the air before deciding to make a hammer-strike he hadn’t fully thought through. But he knew better than anyone, to hesitate was to let the metal harden.

He ran and jumped. 

 

_ \- Eönwë - _

There was something uncertain about the way the light spilt through the windows, filling the room with a strange glow, the colour of—the colour of something that felt like blood, if blood were gold, and looked like fog. It was a heavy light, too bright, too much, but soft—softer than the darkness that existed before it. A lesser of two evils, maybe. 

He hadn’t trusted the forge Maiar who helped to shape it, who gave it that weight—he still didn’t, not really, but he was put in a difficult position. He wasn’t entirely sure that he understood the way that his conscious was constructed, built around sensations of some incorporeal ache and the swell of something that was too—simply too  _ much _ to fit inside a single being. 

The Ainur were not meant to understand the whims of the children. 

He and Mairon disagreed  _ strongly  _ on what exactly that meant. Of course, they both knew  _ their  _ whims—that was perfectly reasonable—but they couldn’t come to a conclusion on the nature of the children for them to be so incomprehensible. 

There were two options. Well, no, that wasn’t  _ entirely  _ true, but all of the various options could all be simplified into one of two categories: either the children felt differently, or they felt less. 

He couldn’t imagine that anyone could ever feel  _ less,  _ so he gravitated to the idea that the way that they felt was so incomprehensible that no one would ever be able to understand it. Mairon didn’t like the prospect of ever not understanding something; it bothered him that there could be ever something that would remain forever a mystery to him. He  _ sincerely _ lacked a sense of wonder. 

He sat in the windowsill, feet dangling over a sheer three-hundred-foot drop down into the lake that surrounded Almaren. Heights didn’t scare him—would a bird ever fear soaring through the sky? He could jump and, even if he neglected to make any sort of attempt to fly, his wings would unfurl, and he would glide. 

No, he didn’t fear heights. 

He feared depths. 

The network of tunnels below the ground that connected all of Aulë’s forges were the epitome of horror (another reason to distrust the forge Maiar), but he found himself drawn there out of necessity all too often. He’d probably never see Mairon if he didn’t seek him out himself. 

The ground—the world below—seemed so limited; there was no freedom there. The sky was infinitely huge, with infinite space to fly and fall as far and as fast as he could ever want.  _ You can only go down so far.   _

He sighed and swung back into the room. Hypothetically these were his quarters, but the room was empty aside from a sphere at the centre with a miniature map of the formation of the clouds drifting across it. All of the buildings were modelled on what they had seen in the song, which was fine, but uncomfortable. They were playing at being something they were not—he did not need to  _ sleep _ —not in the way that would require a room to do it in, and he didn’t need to bathe, or to eat. Not in any way that mattered. 

The palace was all white stone and mosaics of the sky—deep blue, with the delicate pinpricks of glowing tile that resembled the Queen’s stars. 

He stretched out his arms, reaching his fingertips as far as he could, still not filling all of the emptiness of the room in which he was supposed to feel most comfortable. He could only hope that the children would find this less disconcerting than if the Ainur simply lived wherever they pleased. Everywhere and nowhere at the same time. 

There was a knock. He pretended to be surprised at the presence standing in his doorway. 

“You actually showed up.”

“You told me yourself that I’m not allowed to work.” Mairon slipped into the room, staying close to the wall, as far from the open window as he could be. He didn’t like to be so high up in that form. 

“You actually listened.”

He rolled his eyes, straightening himself out so that it didn’t look  _ too  _ obvious that he was clinging to the wall.

A thought crossed Eönwë’s mind that, given a choice between Mairon and flying, he very well might choose the former. He crossed the room to stand next to him and smiled. Mairon offered him his hand and he took it; he was well-ready for some excuse to leave these quarters. 

He looked back for a moment and thought he caught a glimpse of something dark in the dome, but it was gone before his eyes had time to fully adjust to the scene. 

\---

It should’ve been obvious that something was changing—the air crackled with an energy he had never before encountered. Something he couldn’t feel or prove, but that cultivated a growing sense of doom within him.  _ Something is about to go wrong.  _

He wasn’t the only one to feel it; Ilmarë had been clumsy in her duties, distracted, watching the world beneath her instead of the stars above. 

He found himself wandering through the forges—not looking for anyone, though, not really—looking for a reason to be afraid. He hoped that his fear was trivial, that it was something that should be shaken aside and forgotten, but the senses he had been given were far too sharp for that. His problem was trying to tell the false positives apart from the real ones. 

He found himself at the door to Mairon’s workspace (of course, he did), drumming his claws against the stone wall, listening to the gentle clink that they made, counting each beat. It wasn’t soothing. 

He pushed the door open. Mairon was absent. This was not new; as of late he had been less around than not. No one knew where he went, and he didn’t dare ask Manwë to look for him, lest he seem too invested or over-sensitive. But something was off. Something felt different; there was a purpose to it. In an abstract sense. It was poignant. 

He shuddered. 

He felt the roar of a furnace as Arien formed behind him, dropping her wreath of flame for something simpler. He turned to meet her, and she frowned, golden skin and golden eyes and golden hair glowing slightly in the darkness—she and Mairon both glowed; it seemed strange for something to glow like that, he didn’t trust it. 

“He’s not here.”

“I noticed.”

“Where is he?” She asked, lifting a hammer from its place and running a finger over it; it came away covered in ash. Her expression deepened. 

Eönwë just shook his head. 

“Something’s not right.” 

\---

He vanished—he vanished during the battle when everything was crumbling around them, and they were forced to leap from the highest tower in the city so as not to be crushed. As they fell, Eönwë tried to reach for him, but he caught his hands—his grip vice-tight—placed a single, gentle kiss on his lips, then kicked him in the stomach. It took him several precious moments of freefall to regain to his bearings and to steady himself (not that crashing into the lake below could have killed him in any way that mattered).

He caught, as they fell, some burning flame in his eyes—a glimpse of that abstract sense of purpose again. An intent. One that he did not understand, but that was there, and it scared him. It scared him more than being miles below the ground wandering through the forges ever had.

This was not the person that he knew. This was not the person he loved.

This was—this was something else, wearing his skin—his mannerisms—as a means to an end.

He knew, though; he knew something was different—fundamentally changed—when Mairon came to his quarters, dressed in black robes with neat cuffs and leather-armour, and strode straight to the window, looking out over the world below. He smiled, his teeth a little too sharp, clothed in a form that seemed almost to shift and change as he moved. 

Mairon had only been a shapeshifter out of a deep desire for efficiency; after all, it was quicker to change your form as you wore it, rather than to destroy and then remake yourself into the necessary shape. For the most part, he remained static. This was new. 

And he  _ never _ grinned like that. 

\---

“We think Melkor had servants on the inside,” he said, standing in the council room. “It would explain some of the details that we’d otherwise be missing.”

“But who?” Olórin frowned.

“We don’t know exactly, but—” he paused— “We think Ossë, Gothmog and—and Mairon were among those who defected.”

“What will we do?”

“We’ll hunt them down.”

Ilmarë spoke up next to him, a look on her face that he had never seen before, “there is to be no mercy.”

**Author's Note:**

> Of course, in the end, Osse and Mairon do get mercy, but only because they're both found by the people who love(d) them. If, say, Mairon had had to fight Arien, he would've been slaughtered--she was just as mad as anyone else except she wasn't held back by any romantic feelings.
> 
> Also!! I know she was a maia of Vana, but I thought it would be interesting if she started as a maia of Aule, then left because she couldn't stand going back to work in the same place she used to work with someone she thought was her friend.


End file.
